Where is our holy church?

UU Theological responses from a free pulpit in the Bible Belt

Sermon by Lin Wells

Given Sunday morning, July 31, 2005
at First Jefferson Unitarian Universalist Church,
Fort Worth, Texas

CALL TO WORSHIP

PREFACE

I’m Lin Wells. I begin attending this church twenty-five years ago. It is no secret: most people here know that I love this church. We all know that the word gospel means good news. I have good news for you this morning. What is holy is our relationship with each other, and we will bring church into existence by exercising our power to come together and to support each other in our spiritual development.

It is important to point out that ours is a tradition of the free pulpit and the free pew. That means that whoever has the honor and privilege to speak from this pulpit is free to say what he or she believes, and that you are free to disagree.

This free pulpit has been here since 1949. Vivian Aldrich, a charter member and one of our oldest and most honored members, has been here most Sundays since that time to see if she agrees with what is being spoken from this pulpit, and you had better make sure her hearing device is working.

A week or two ago, maybe a month (to be perfectly honest I’m not even sure this actually happened) but after the service, I hurried to the foyer to greet our exiting visitors and I met this person who seemed annoyed.

I said, "Pardon me for saying so, but you seem to be a little irritated, a little aggravated, a little peeved. If you don’t mind, I’m curious."

She said, "Well, since you brought it up, I don’t mind one bit telling you that I don’t agree with a thing that preacher said."

"Well, ma’am," I said, "I can assure you of one thing, you will fit right in."

INTRODUCTION

The question, "What do we believe?" is an interesting one. Or, rather, I should say the reaction to that question is an interesting one. Most times, people start looking around for a brochure or that little "principles and purposes" card that you think you remember putting in your wallet. (See endnotes.)

A few weeks ago, we UUs conducted a telemarketing campaign in Fort Worth. The most important part of our training session was the 25 minutes devoted to the "Elevator Speech Development Workshop." If we’re going to talk to strangers on the telephone about our church, we sure need to know what we believe. One of several questions we considered in that exercise was "How does our religious tradition provide you and your family with the freedom and context you need to make sense of, and deepen, your spiritual experiences?" That question illustrates why the question "What do we believe?" is so hard. Because the real question is "What do you believe?" I can almost assure you that an exercise like this doesn’t happen in any other church in America. It is not easy being a Unitarian Universalist.

Nevertheless, undaunted in my quest for the answer to "What do we believe?" I went where I usually go − to the internet. Among my findings are these:

  1. A UU bumper sticker: "Give me ambiguity … or give me something else."
  2. What do you get when you cross a UU with a Jehovah’s Witness? Someone who goes around knocking on doors for no apparent reason.
  3. Or the little girl, starting first grade, whose classmate said to her, "We’re Episcopalians. What are you?" To which she replied, "I’m not sure, I think we’re League of Women Voters."

Well, there are many others, some quite funny, but I couldn’t help but be a little saddened to see us described as if we don’t stand for anything, free thinkers without any substance.

We have our P and Ps, the principles and purposes, which are printed, framed, and prominently hung in every UU church − and also printed on that card some of us have in our wallets.

Chief Joseph, the last chief of the Nez Perce, said, "It does not require many words to speak the truth. So in that spirit, I went to the internet again, to find the P & Ps in their simplest form. These appear in several variations on the children’s Religious Education pages of many church websites:

Every one is special and important.

All people should be treated fairly.

Yearn to learn throughout life.

Grow by exploring ideas and finding your own truth.

Believe in your ideas and act on them.

Insist on peace, freedom, and justice for all.

Value the earth and all living things.

These are good principles and sources, and we should keep them, but as one wag said, you could read them in any Rotary Club in America and get no argument.

But the Bible Belt is concerned about sin and salvation, hell and heaven.

The president of the UUA, William Sinkford, stood in this pulpit on Jan 12, 2003, and made a statement that sparked a great debate. He simply said, "We need to return to religious language that will allow the religious left to speak to the public sphere." Our last General Assembly was structured around this theme, thus rekindling the debate.

I came to this church many years ago as a refugee from religious fundamentalism. I didn’t know much about what I believed, but I sure as shootin’ knew what I didn’t believe.

My view has changed over those years. Quite frankly, as I stand before you today, I am alarmed. During those years, I have watched the rise of the religious right. This spectacle is intensified by my upbringing in a family of fundamentalist evangelicals. My father and my brother are ministers in a conservative Protestant denomination. I saw my father yesterday, and he told me he had been to Memphis to hear my brother preach. I did not invite my father to hear me preach today. I am going to be saying some provocative things in a few minutes and there is no need to give him a heart attack. I have observed my old church transform from a population of kind, gentle, and apolitical folks to an increasingly intolerant people following a political agenda set by James Dobson and Pat Robinson. I have watched the alliance between evangelicals and the economic and political power elites develop, and today I realize that not only have they taken over, they are rapidly putting an agenda in place that includes the persecution and disenfranchisement of selected minority groups, the dismantling of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and the destruction of not just 60 years of social process but 150 years of social progress.

I have come to realize that not only is it important what I believe. It is vitally important that I know how to articulate those beliefs and to be a part of a denomination that reaches deeply into the social and political fabric of our country with a compelling and effective message of salvation, a message of good news.

I attended a program a year ago at First Church, Dallas, presented by Starr King Seminary and featuring the president of Starr King, Rebecca Parker. She said:

"Our congregations are a school for development of souls, thinking and activism."

We have a curriculum in which many of you have participated, called "Building Your Own Theology." This is a good program, and we should keep it, but it implies that we have no theology and that you are on your own. Rebecca Parker says that this is not true. We have a distinctive and rich theology, and we should study it and use it. Rather than building your own house, the house already exists; we should move in and start remodeling it. Spiff it up and start inviting everyone we see to come live in it.

SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY (see endnote)

What is our structure? Our ecclesiology? What holds us together in our theological community?

The traditional church structure was allied with monarchs and dealt with pyramids of power. In this structure, church is established to define your place. People are held together by a creed and a hierarchy of power. Church tells you what you can and cannot do. What you can and cannot believe. What you can buy. What you can watch. Who can get married and who they can get married to. Structures that contribute to great disparities of wealth and poverty and disempowerment of ordinary folk.

My friend, this is not good news. I’ve got good news for you this morning.

Our forebears turned that upside down. That’s not holy.

What is holy is our relationship with each other, and we will bring church into being by exercising our power to come together. We don’t have to think alike, but we do have to be committed to one another. Not to something outside of us – but to something between us.

Every person is a priest and a prophet.

Our understanding of church is inherently revolutionary and inherently disruptive of established structures of power. It contributes to democratic communities and democratic political systems. It contributes to community-based organizing. (See endnote)

How does our tradition relate to other traditions?
What is our missiology?
How mission is understood.

The more traditional approach says that there is only way to salvation, to God, and it is our way or the highway to hell. And, given enough political power, we will help you get there a little faster than you expected. One of the leading Unitarians in the reformation, Michael Servetus, was burned at the stake by John Calvin.

For Unitarians Universalists that’s really not good news.

How do we understand the other religions on the planet? We regard the other religions on the planet as beautiful and good. We collect their things. We like to visit other churches, temples, synagogues, mosques, to observe or participate in other rituals. We bring many practices together. We learn from one another. We embrace the freedom to draw on the wisdom of all the world’s religious traditions and to keep exchanges going.

We are not trying to dismantle the other religions or convert the other religions. There are no Unitarian Universalist missionaries in Iraq. Our mission is to learn from one another, to respect one another, to be in relationship with one another

How do we relate to God, divinity or the ultimate?
What is our theological anthropology?
How we speak about humanity?

The dominant view is of God as a divine tyrant, a divine ruler, judging the entire world and decreeing how everything should be, with no free will for anyone, and with punishment for those who don’t obey. In that view, a baby is born as a depraved sinner, and our human nature is profoundly corrupted. Without the saving intervention of the atoning blood of Christ; the child will go to hell.

Nothing about this is good news on many levels.

What do we say about humanity? It can be summarized in one word: Humanity is good.

We are born and created in the image of God, and the human being is inherently good. We have capacities of the soul that, if unfolded, reveal the divinity in each of us.

The more we embrace our humanness and allow the abundance of our human capacity to flourish and be employed in life, the more we are like God – the more holy we are.

If we want to know God, we have to know ourselves. The whole world is a manifestation of God’s mind. We can also know God by understanding the world – through all the sciences. We will come to know God by reverencing and reflecting upon ourselves. We see God is around us because he dwells in us.

Images of a monarch-ruler-king don’t express what is best about human nature.

Images shift from divine monarchy to images that are going to sponsor in the world an affirmation of our relationship with one another – of democratic community and of responsibility in the social network – to love and care for each other.

Other images arise. God as mother – matrix and giver of tender and unselfish love. Women are created in the image of God, and God can therefore be imaged as female.

How we image God has implications for the social order. Images of God function to legitimate structures in the political and social realm. If we image ruler-judge-king mode, we will legitimate those structures….. There are social implications to saying humans are good. If we are depraved, we must be punished. If we are good, then we must be developed. We must grow, and society has the responsibility to see that it happens.

In our UU history, this idea led to a whole slew of social movements. Remember these:

Margaret Fuller and the liberation of women.

Horace Mann and public education.

William Ellery Channing and the abolition movement

How we image God influences the way society is structured and what is legitimized, how oppression functions, and how liberation may occur.

That means our constructions of God matter. Whether God exists is a more specialized question.

Once we say we know God by knowing ourselves, we open the door for what has been called a persistent and profound humanism, and that humanism places the focus on knowing ourselves.

We cannot, and must not, escape how we think about the ultimate, because it always has social implications. It’s in our hands.

What threatens life and what saves us? What is our soteriology?
What is the danger and how we are saved from it

The dominant church view is that we need to be saved from the threat of eternal damnation − an eternity of unfathomable punishment at the hands of an unfathomable evil in the unfathomable fiery depths of hell.

My friends, we have now reached the heart of the UU good news.

UUs have fired the god who would eternally punish us, and we have rejected as cruel and contributing to violence in the world the whole notion that God saved the world by sending Jesus to die on the cross as payment for human sin.

We insist that evil, suffering, and violence that is present in the world is stuff that we do to one another, that we are capable of doing profound harm, and that hell and the devil are known in our own midst and are in us.

But the dominate way of imagining salvation has legitimated violence as saving. And it has legitimated the division of the world between those who are good and those who are evil, between those who are saved and those who are damned. The Rev. Robert Hardies, senior minister of All Souls Church, Unitarian, in Washington, D.C., was the Sunday morning speaker at our General Assembly. He pointed out that "All Souls" is a popular name for UU churches. "Can you imagine a church called ‘Some Souls’"? "But isn't that the de facto name of the dominant religions in America today?"

Such theology makes it possible, in this world, for us to treat some human beings as damned, as expendable, as exploitable, or as deserving of death and punishment − and others as deserving of salvation.

This also has profound social and political implications. Our theological heritage rejects the idea that what you do with that which threatened life is bomb the hell out of it. We recognize that theologies of a God who punishes evildoers with eternal damnation legitimates worldly rulers who punish evil doers with violence.

What saves us then, if violence won’t?

Our tradition has answered this in a variety of ways.

It’s not destruction that saves us, but creativity. It’s the creation of healing relationships, creation of connectedness that repairs the brokenness of the world and saves us.

We also say love saves us. What do we really mean? What kind of love really does repair, heal and protect?

From what does life need to provide shelter?

When we have done harm, we need that harm to be repaired to make it possible for us to do right by one another.

So where are we headed? What is our eschatology?

How is time is understood? What is the ultimate end-point of history?

For the traditional church, this is a multi-million dollar question, literally. Last I checked, Hal Lindsey had gone through 28 printings of The Late Great Planet Earth.

Tim LaHaye and his ghostwriter have made millions from their Left Behind series.

Premillennial dispensationalism is a fantastic fiction invented by John Nelson Darby around 1840. He was the first major figure in a revolution that reversed the protestant movement’s progress toward a church of love and almost totally replaced the gospel message with an emphasis on bizarre moralistic and apocalyptic doctrines.

Not only is this not good news, it’s not even a good story.

We hold to another view. We are not headed to a future destruction of the earth in a final triumph of goodness over evil.

We say that everything we hope for in the future is something we should be grasping here and now.

This material world is not going to disappear. This world is permeated with the presence of the holy. Our lives are good – heaven and earth are to be created here.

The new heaven and new earth are available right now. And we bring in the Kingdom of God when we love one another, when we do justice, when we relate compassionately. We find heaven in our midst when we embrace this world as good.

Where are we headed...? We are headed to the here and now. We’re headed to really being here – not somewhere else − but here. To living our lives fully in this world. Cherishing and reverencing this world. That’s our eschatology. It is a realized eschatology.

CONCLUSION

We live in a world today where upwards of 30 million children under the age of 15 have no medical insurance. Where a major part of our labor force comes from other countries and they are not enslaved, they are criminalized. Where the Bill of Rights and constitutional rights are slipping through our fingers while I speak. Where corporations have become so powerful they even have the right of eminent domain. Where streams and lakes and oceans are so full of industrial filth that you can’t eat the fish. Where state legislatures have to go into special sessions to pass an education budget and refuse to provide even the minimum resources to do the job.

I no longer want to know how many Unitarian Universalists it takes to change a light bulb; I want to know how many Unitarian Universalist it takes to change the world.

The Good News of Unitarian Universalisism is powerful. It works. It has been tested. It has saved the world before, and it can save the world we are living in now.

I know exactly how many Unitarian Universalists it takes to change the world. It is a very hard answer. It takes me and you, and you and you, and you and me. It takes us, banding together, working together, believing our good news, proclaiming our good news on the highways and the byways, in the schools and the hospitals, in the workplaces and the boardrooms, where we live and work.

 

I pray to God: Let it be so.

 

(ENDNOTE)

Get yours today at First Jefferson Church

(ENDNOTE)

Our church is a member of a local Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) (http://www.industrialareasfoundation.org/index.htm ). The IAF is a major force in the community based organizing movement in America today. It is through movement like these that we will reestablish and strengthen democracy in America. The local IAF is called Allied Communities of Tarrant County (http://www.swuuc.org/fjuuc/ACT/index.htm ). I strongly urge you to get involved. See anyone in the ACT core group at First Jefferson.

(ENDNOTE)

Most of the material in the Systematic Theology section of this sermon was presented by Rebecca Parker at "Seminary for a Day" September 27, 2003.

This was a program presented by First Unitarian Church, Dallas, Starr King School for the Ministry and the Southwest Unitarian Universalist Conference Leadership Development Committee. The program was titled "The Power of Progressive Religion: Deepening our Understanding and Experience of Unitarian Universalism."

We were charged that day to go forth and spread the good news to our churches and beyond. I have faithfully tried to carry out that charge in this sermon.

I sincerely believe that UU theological answers to Biblical fundmentalism should be the main central message of our denomination at this time to the country. I also believe that social justice should be of central importance, but is a more difficult challenge.

The responses I have had to this sermon from visitors to our church has convinced me more that ever that William Sinkford’s call "to return to religious language that will allow the religious left to speak to the public sphere" is what is needed to speak to the religious environment of our day and reach large numbers of people.

Rebecca Parker’s talk came from a course about Unitarian Universalist theology offered online at the Starr King School for the Ministry titled "Our Theological House" and can be found here.

http://online.sksm.edu/ce/courses/current.htm